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The first lady’s comments, made during a roundtable discussion with a half-dozen nutrition leaders in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, are part of the White House response to an agriculture spending bill backed by House Republicans that would grant schools waivers next year if they are losing money under mandates to serve more whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

It’s a rare, high-profile policy move for Obama, who has taken a decidedly collaborative approach to tackling childhood obesity, partnering with companies like Wal-Mart and Subway. She also tended to keep a low profile during political battles over marketing to kids or even whether pizza should count as a vegetable.

House Republicans argue that the waivers are needed for schools struggling to meet overly prescriptive regulations.

“It is clear to me that it is time for the administration to hit the pause button on the implementation of school nutrition guidelines and listen to the feedback — some of the rules are unworkable and having the opposite effect,” Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, said last month. “I am hearing this from the school administrators as well as the students themselves.”

But the White House sees the attack on the standards as an attempt to dissolve much-needed reforms mandated by the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, a bill firmly backed by Obama that cleared Congress with strong bipartisan support.

“We have to be willing to fight the hard fight now,” said Obama in the meeting with nutrition advocates on Tuesday. “In 10 or 20 years, I don’t want to look back with regret and think that we gave up on our kids because we felt like this thing was too hard or too expensive. We owe our kids way more than that.”

The push by the first lady and her office follows the unveiling in February of bold changes to Nutrition Facts labels, a policy the East Wing was actively involved in crafting. Until then, Obama and her team had largely avoided playing a major role in the process of crafting federal policy — focusing on partnerships with foundations and corporations, rather than on regulations and interagency coordination.

Now, just weeks after speaking out for the first time on a truly heated, front-burner foreign policy issue — the kidnappings of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls — the first lady has ventured onto even trickier terrain: battling domestic political pushback as her nutrition agenda hits stiff congressional headwinds.

Leading the charge for peeling back the regulations is the School Nutrition Association, a powerful trade group representing 55,000 school nutrition workers and companies that supply school food.

The group has aggressively lobbied lawmakers for more flexibility on the rules using the appropriations process to both get waivers for schools and to try to amend the next round of regulations, which would increase whole-grain requirements and sharply limit junk food sold in cafeterias.